Office Visit: School Nurse

To get to Judy Rosenfeld’s office, you walk through the massive, dark-tiled lobby of Mission High (it feels less like a high school than Union Station in Los Angeles) and then down a stairwell, past murals of bird-headed gods and other figures from Mayan folklore, down another basement hallway, and into a small concrete room with about the same floorspace as a picnic blanket.

It’s quite nice. Experimental jazz is playing quietly. There are two large posters of (respectively) the male and female reproductive system on the wall. The posters are there less because they’re fun to look at all day than because they function as conversation starters. Mission High has a sex ed curriculum, but Rosenfeld, a small, gray-haired woman with an air of infinite calm, gets plenty of questions anyway. “Menstruation – what is it?” is one. “Is this normal”is another. “Am I ready to have sex? Am I ready? Am I ready?” is also common – raised in this tiny office by both boys and girls.

“The perception is,” Rosenfeld says, “that everyone is having sex. But in San Francisco, only 17 percent of teenagers between the ages of 14 and 18 reported having sex. In the last 30 days, at least. And that is not everyone.”

Most of the room’s decoration serves double duty as a conversational lead-in: the racks of test tubes showing the relative amounts of sugar, fat and salt in things like jello and soda and so forth (the “What are you eating and is it good for you?” conversation starter). There is a heavy jar of black schmutz that can be shaken up like a snow globe, so that the mass inside oozes down the sides like an oil slick (the “Maybe you shouldn’t smoke” conversation starter). And there’s a Tupperware container stacked with different examples of birth control methods (self-explanatory, and one of the most popular items in the room.)